New Upper Body plan
I currently have 2 upper body days a week, and 2 lower body days. I pair them together, and do heavy upper body followed by light/stability lower body, then vice versa two days later.
Recently, I realized that I wasn’t spending enough time on my shoulders and arms, so I crammed those into the tail end of my upper body workout. To make this work, I basically changed my upper body workout to be 3 sets each of upper cable flys and lower cable flys, supersetted with upper and lower reverse cable fly for my back. I did some warm up of my shoulders, chest and back, but that was about it, followed by exercises for my arms and shoulders.
Last week, when doing the flys, I went a bit heavier, and I really concentrated on contracting my chest muscles. It worked great, but left my back feeling really tired and sore for the next few days. I didn’t stretch enough afterwards, and doing anything that resembles an incline press tightens the crap out of my pec minor muscles, which causes them to pull on my rhomboid area, which causes my back to get sore (in the area between my shoulder blades). So…
I’m going to throw in more stability work after my cable flys. I’m going to start doing scapular retractions, reverse scapular retractions with a barbell, and an exercise that is like ’stirring the soup’ with a dumbbell. Hopefully that will help expand that tight region around my rhomboids. The trick will be fitting those new stability exercises in with the arm and shoulder work, and not going too much over an hour.
May 6, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Sounds like a good plan to me (for what it’s worth). I hope things loosen up for you and that the gains keep coming!